Weiwei has taken Denmark to task for its asylum-seeker policy. Given Australia’s decision to return 267 asylum seekers to Nauru, he should surely consider pulling his current Melbourne exhibition.
Anthony Lister’s street art has been well received internationally, but his home town has found him guilty of vandalism.
Anthony Lister/Birdman Photos
Brisbane street artist Anthony Lister has been convicted of ‘wilful damage’ graffiti. Who is being harmed, when our legal system is forced to devalue cultural capital?
Visitors look at the painting The Visit from 1939 by Paul Delvaux during the 2011 exhibition Surrealism in Paris.
REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann
As the longest-running avant-garde movement of the 20th century, Surrealism’s scope and richness is perhaps unparalleled in its influence of modern art and culture.
Guy Grey-Smith’s painting showcases the insistent rhythms of the indigenous vegetation and the rolling, flowing movements that take our eye meandering across the landscape and back towards the horizon.
That traditional monolith of culture, the museum, has begun to embrace the digital world. As a series of projects reveal, the possibilities are endless.
What is the male gaze, and does the female gaze exist?
Andy Simmons
Paul Dalgarno, The Conversation et Madeleine De Gabriele, The Conversation
It’s another year in Arts + Culture, so in case you missed it we’ve collected all the best coverage of screen, theatre, music, books and culture in one place.
The NGV’s summer exhibition is curated to create a dialogue between Ai Weiwei and Andy Warhol, and this conversation operates on multiple levels on a variety of themes, and across time and space.
Art demonstrated it still has the power to inspire, and maybe even change the world.
A man carries a self-portrait painted by Australian death row prisoner Myuran Sukumaran. Beawiharta
There are as many ways to summarise a “year in art” as there are eyes to look at art with. Art had some shining – and not-so-shining – moments in 2015.
Gough Whitlam’s government paid $A1.3 million for Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles in 1973. But why exactly is this ‘seemingly unintelligible mess of house paint’ revered as a masterpiece?
Lurid Beauty is the first major examination of Australian Surrealism and its profound impact on Australian art from the 1930s to the present day. So how does it all hang together?
Parke raises important questions about whether humanism is desirable or even possible in photography today.
Exhibition space, Monash Gallery of Art.
The title of Parke’s current exhibition alludes to a 19th-century faith in the camera’s mechanical vision as superior to human vision – while also complicating that assumption for modern viewers.
The marketing of Australian art largely remains a provincial exercise within a global art environment.
Image: Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, 2015. AAP Image/NEWZULU/THINKING MEDIA
Despite rhetoric positioning Australia as a clever and creative country, its artists, particularly in the visual arts, are doing it tough, and things are progressing from bad to worse. Why is that?
A standard trope suggests this is a war between art and commerce – it isn’t.
EPA/ Facundo Arrizabalaga
Many voices have united in claiming the toy giant Lego is censoring the provocative Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. There are so many things wrong with those arguments it’s hard to know where to begin.
Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei’s deft use of social media has enabled him to gather worldwide support in his fight against censorship.
AAP One
What makes Ai Wei Wei so powerful? Critics say if he didn’t exist, he’d need to be invented: an artist who’s combined his life and art into a politically charged performance that helps define how we see modern China.
In the middle of a rose garden, on a leafy road in northwest London, nestles the Freud Museum – though the petals, in October, are tumbling. The house, at 20 Maresfield Gardens, is the proud bearer of…
At the opening night of her private view and book launch, poet and artist Frieda Hughes appeared at the door of the Belgravia Gallery in Mayfair, a small but striking figure in a pillarbox-red suit. In…
The use of live animals in the visual arts provokes important ethic questions. Pictured: Pierre Huyghe Untilled (2011-2012).
Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris; Esther Schipper, Berlin.
An exhibition of works by contemporary French artist Pierre Huyghe raises questions around the ethical treatment of animals by artists - and whether live animals have a place in the visual arts.
Infrastruktur, Nicole Wermers, 2015 at Tramway in Glasgow.
Andrew Milligan/PA Wire
The Horse, currently on display at the National Gallery of Victoria, celebrates the pivotal role the horse has played in the evolution of civilisation.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne